Epignosis I: Our Story First
Kokopelli Gallery | Lagos | ADA KALU

Epignosis I: Our Story First creates a dialogue between Gbolahan Ayoola's established practice and five emerging artists from the gallery's Once Upon A Time Residency, which brought mentorship, community living and research together across a season of work. With artists drawn from across the continent, the exhibition treats stories as intentional practices — forms of knowledge that carry memory, identity and cultural history. Ayoola's engagement with language, culture and anthropology runs as a thread through the show, while leaving room for the resident artists to offer their own readings of cultural history. Putin Bempong's mixed-media works are the clearest instance: built on a brown, document-laden base — faded official papers, a stray word like "secondment," calendar dates worked into the surface — they hold past and present at once, then lift out of the archive through sudden colour and gesture into something like a constructed world in motion. Estifanos Solomon Gashaw's printmaking grapples more soberly with materiality and the weight of history. Hung in proximity, the two propose storytelling not as a single tradition but as competing registers — one layered and archival, the other grounded and immediate. Epignosis I is at its strongest where it lets those differences stand.
Opens 12 September 2026.

Ruth Ige, Woven Realms
Kó | Lagos | ADEOLUWA OLUWAJOBA

Marking her first solo show in Lagos, Ruth Ige's Woven Realms uses weaving less as a material process than as a way of describing how bodies and landscapes interlace across the works. Across painted canvases and works on paper, the artist's abstracted landscapes — in varying tones of blue, populated by shifting forms and bodies — create an impression of surreal, transitional worlds, sometimes familiar, often strange. Silhouetted figures recede into and advance from the landscape, inextricably linked, and this intricate mix of realms and inhabiting bodies lends the exhibition its woven texture.Flower petals frame the portrait of a shadow; a solitary figure moves languidly through mottled landscape. The paintings invite comparison with Yusuf Grillo's blue, elongated figures — a lineage itself woven from adire textile into paint — and the question the show quietly poses is what Ige does with that inheritance: whether her figures extend Grillo's sealed, elegant body or, dissolving into the landscape, make it permeable.
Opens 12 September · Through 17 October 2026.

Chika Idu, Pure Water
SMO Contemporary Art at ARAMI | Lagos |
SUNSHINE ALAIBE

In Pure Water, Chika Idu turns water into a protective element — a space where children might move freely, safe from being anyone's soft target. It is a tender, unsettling body of work, and in conversation the artist located its source in his own childhood: a subconscious attempt, he says, to build for others the safety he was denied. The women recur too, but changed. Where Idu once painted them with their eyes closed — a comment on the silencing of women — here the eyes begin to open, a movement from imposed quiet toward independence and awareness. Across a thirty-year practice, Idu has rarely made work this holistic or this exposed. The result rewards slow looking: what first reads as serene surface reveals itself as something closer to vigilance. See it, and sit with the conversation online.
Through 30 November 2026.

Barthélémy Toguo, The Nomadic Studio
Galerie Lelong | Paris | NANA POULOT

Over a thirty-year career, Barthélémy Toguo has spent long stretches living and working outside his native Cameroon, with recent sojourns in Japan, Morocco, India and Paris — a nomadic life given material form in his latest show at Galerie Lelong. Here Toguo explores new materials and techniques, among them porcelain pieces featuring marine motifs, developed with the artisans at the Manufacture de Sèvres, in which his distinctive "Toguo blue" — across corals, seaweed and aquatic organisms — evokes the timeless oscillations of the abyss. Shifting between painting, ceramics, tapestry and porcelain, Toguo reflects on the connections and dislocations between self and others, nature and the body, submersion and revelation — what we lose and what we retain as we move through life. An itinerant practice, at once anchored and in motion.
10 September – 10 October 2026

Ladji Diaby, Godspeed You Black Emperor
Galerie Crèvecœur | Paris | NANA POULOT

Central to Ladji Diaby's art is a merger of memory and everyday life, and a penchant for found artefacts. These saleable goods are flea-market furniture: model cars, toy robots, a mirrored cabinet, gilded bird ornaments and a pharaoh-shaped lamp are among the objects encountered in the pristine white space of Galerie Crèvecœur. These everyday items stand in for people — talismans, carriers of memory — but they also question the systems of value through which objects, identities and histories are assigned worth. As Diaby explains: "Take the figure of the demon. The way I read it, I imagine demons as just another marginalised group — which recalls historical attempts to render the Black body monstrous, casting people of African descent in all the wrong roles." An alchemist bent on turning lead into gold, Diaby turns the gallery into his own flea market, where the sacred and the mundane collide — one of the most comprehensive accounts of his practice to date.
 11 September – 28 November 2026